Missives of a Baseball Milquetoast

I spent this past Memorial Day weekend relaxing in my childhood hometown of Virginia Beach, Virginia. The holiday always symbolized the beginning of summer to me and because I can only associate this impending season with baseball, I feel compelled to showcase a hat from the team that entertained me for so many summers: the Norfolk Tides. ....and now for some sad news: This style is one that the Tides only wear on the road and sadly I've never actually seen them wearing this cap as I haven't yet had a chance to see them play anywhere other than Harbor Park in Norfolk. This particular cap is from 2011, but I've been unable to find any photos of Tides wearing the cap in any cards before 2009 and there doesn't seem to be too many recent cards out there where they are wearing it either. On a more positive note, I personally like this logo more than any of the other versions from recent years, though I'm not sure if I could really describe what action is happening on...

If there's one thing about Ebbets Field Flannels that I appreciate the most, it's that they take great lengths in reproducing what seems like the most obscure caps ever made and that almost all of the caps that they release have the following features: wool broadcloth, a horse hair buckram crown and satin taping. This particular replica is one of the 1969 Clinton Pilots. I don't have any other ballcaps with the "scrambled egg" design on the visor and that's probably because I'm usually not crazy about it being used on non-miltary hats. My childhood hometown had a large population of military personnel so respect for the armed services is inherent with most of the population.  Maybe that's why I feel as though the "scrambled egg" strictly belongs on military headware and as much as I respect the history of the design, I surely welcome it more than the so-to-speak "patriotic" designs that are MLB-approved. Since I'...

It seems like lately I haven't been able to come up with an answer to this very simple question: what is it that makes a minor league ballcap interesting? In the past I argued that a minor league team's cap logo is inherently more interesting if it has very little resemblance to that of its parent club.  Yet, I've also recently applauded caps that make an interesting allusion to their parent clubs while maintaining a local sensibility in the logo. The latter is certainly the case with this Stockton Ports cap: An item of note is that the Stockton Ports have long-believed that the  Ernest Thayer poem "Casey at the Bat" was based on their team. While that might or might not be true, I like that they believe it enough to use an image of a Mudville Nine batter-man, who himself is wearing a pillbox cap with an M on it. I love meta-caps! As for the production year on this cap, there is no evidence of it before the 1994 season. It's not often-see...

I'm realizing that I've been fixated on this need to spotlight teams with "original" monikers and I think it's time to switch things up a little bit. Just because a team was called the "Midland Angels " doesn't mean it lacked an identity of its own. It might just seem like some weird combination of logos from the Los Angeles Angels and Texas Rangers, but this Midland Angels cap from the mid-1990's is a fine example of a minor league club achieving an ideal balance of showing respect to its parent team while also displaying (Texas-sized) state pride. In 1999 though, things became more confusing for baseball fans in the Southern Plains of western Texas when the team's 14 year long affiliation with the Angels ended and a new one (that still lasts today) began with the Oakland Athletics. They rebranded themselves as the Midland RockHounds, a nickname that I still do not understand. I guess there are special dogs that roam patches of rocks in...

Update : While I originally stated that this cap was probably from 1992, I really should have also mentioned that 59Fifty tags didn't appear until 1994. I've seen New Era use older, leftover tags on caps, if this is really from 1992 then this is interesting because they applied a 59Fifty tag from 1994 on a cap with a green underbrim and no MILB batterman. Either I've been wrong about the 59Fifty tag first appearing in 1994 or they ran out of the 1992 tags at some point in the manufacturing process and had to use the ones from 1994 ahead of time, which is so weird. Update (4/20/2019) : This blog has been a learning experience for me over the years but sometimes new information comes to light so I've got to fall on my sword about something here. The previous update to this post mistakenly states that the 59Fifty tag first appeared in 1994 but I've seen caps from 1992 and 1993 that have it so there's that.  More importantly, I should mention that the only Rive...